Definitely going to grab this, sounds ace. I was about to dive into HOI for the nth time to try and get decent at it, but this sounds much more up my street. Can't sleep so am downloading the demo now....

If you’re not terrified of maps then you can play and enjoy Crusader Kings II. It’s that simple. Do you like pondering alternate histories and creating grand narratives? That’s what this game is about. Do you enjoy courtly interplay and elaborate plots of succession, marriage and murder? That’s also what this game is about.

Heck, do you like A Game of Thrones? This is the best Game of Thrones game you will probably ever play, unless you really need the fantasy element and if you do, then for God’s sake just pretend that pagans are riding wolves and French people have six eyes or whatever it is you need to do, but play this game. There’s incest and intrigue aplenty and isn’t that what GRRARGH Martin is really all about?

A fun twist in my game, as the child of a cousin I married off many years ago and forgot all about has risen to become duke of Modena, adding to his various German counties most of the territory previously held by the duchess Mathilda of Toscana, who was herself the dominant power in HRE Italy. He controls a Barony within my realm, too. Anyway, he has decided to press his claim on Apulia, and so now the two biggest powers in Italy are at war. At the same time I am dealing with a rebellious heretic count of Catanzaro, a peasant revolt in Malta, and being one of the few left attacking the Shia Caliphate in a floundering crusade for Acre (hired the Templars for that).

I am completely absorbed by this game now, and even know what I'm doing now, too. Well, most of the time.

3rd generation -> accidental King of Norway. Not bad, but holding that title for my son, in an Elective Monarchy where we're the English interlopers is going to be hard. Especially as I just got busted trying to assassinate a 3 year old.

My first character was the Earl of Shrewsbury, who got Shrewsbury to a point where it was about to hire mercenaries and kick off an independence war. Pre-empting that, the King (who'd survived the Normans and the Norwegians of 1066) gave me Cornwall and Devon. I thanked him and carried on plotting. I was but a whisker away from having my 2nd character declare the war for Shrewsburian Independence when the King went and pressed my claim for the Norwegian throne on my behalf. My character died, buyt the English King pressed my son's claim. Ten long years of war, and suddenly my 3rd character is the King of Norway.

Ever the ungreateful sod, I then refused to come to England's aid against Lancastrian rebellion, Scottish invasion and a holy war in some far off hell hole. Now, with Norway about to slip from my grasp, I'm cleaning out Norway's coffers and barracks, and looking to take the English throne for myself.

Love the game and the crazy things that pop up on the map. Wales is now part of Castille. Naturally.

Why, as the King of Norway, would it be good for me to create the Kingdom of Sweden?

Also, I always jealously hang onto all of my titles. I have never given a landed title to anybody, not even my sons. What's wrong with doing it that way? (as my demsne is now at 9/6 I may soon find out!)

Fab game, so, so absorbing. Oh, and as for the "human" angle; that's so true. I was notified about the death of Mayor Eadwin. I looked at his character page....unknown parents, had never been married, no children or siblings. He was a club-footed hunchback. But he was MY club-footed hunchback, and he'd been a loyal, but unrecognised, mayor for 35 years. I should've found the poor guy a wife.

Creating the Kingdom of Sweden gives you a prestige boost (not just a one-time thing - holding titles increases your monthly prestige gain too) and makes any vassals you have in Swedish lands more loyal since you're now their de jure liege. However, if your succession law is gavelkind, then your realm will split in two upon your ruler's death. If it's Elective, Seniority, or Primogeniture, it'll stay together.

Norway's elective, but they're looking to vote against me (or my nominated heir, rather). Clumsy faield assassintations aren't helping. I've got to get to ten years of rul and all vassals having poistive opinion of me before I can change it. And my character's just become both ill and infirm...I think my son's getting kicked out back to Shrewsbury, unless I can grab the English crown fromt eh man who put the Norwegian one on my head.

Never played a game with such fantastic shceming and plotting before. I've utterly lost track of my extended family now, though. The women in my family always seem to crop up as spymasters when I marry them off however. I think there are six of them running things from the shadows, all around Europe at the moment. My own wife has 31 for intrigue!

So I'm now King of Sicily after my grandson inherited and was able to create the title in 1155. This allowed me to dish out some of my duchies to keep my vassals happy. The first King of Sicily is therefore Alexander, who has rather poor stats but was the only surviving male heir in the mainline dynasty after several generations of women (his father had died young). For some reason, though, I'm German, which makes no sense to me.

Meanwhile the damn di Lecce dynasty have been a thorn in my side for generations - one of them, Count Osbern, usurped many of my counts to become my most powerful vassal with six counties, and his son, Bohemund, continued the tradition, with ambitions on my titles. I gave him a duchy, which kept him sweet for a while but he had recently managed to find himself elected as my heir. Anyway, he suddenly died, and his 18 year old daughter is now the unmarried duchess of Taranto. I'm planning to assassinate my current (chaste) wife, marry her and get her pumped so that I don't need to worry about the di Lecces too much in future. Hopefully any sons I have with her will share some of the strong attributes running through that family.

Edit: I think I might invade Croatia once I've subdued some more North African arabs. Have claims on a few territories there, and I think I can take them, especially with the help of the King of Hungary. Either that or I'll go crusading. Sicily is a pretty powerful kingdom.

That's become untrue, actually. Getting votes for my son to be the nominated heir of the Norwegian throne is costing me titles by the handful. If I look at my vassals, some of them have a speech mark next to their names, which indicates they are ones with voting powers. Half I keep sweet, half get murdered followed rapidly by every heir their family cares to put in the line of fire.

I always keep duchys within my culture (especially important in England), and try to keep them within my dynasty as well so that worst comes to the worst and there's a succession crisis I end up playing a the victor. I like to keep all my duchies of similar size, to prevent someone swallowing his neighbours. I find 3-4 provinces is ample.

My plan to marry that duchess actually worked... but then we never had any children, and before I could get my son from my first marriage to be elected as my heir, I died at the age of 28. So now I'm my elderly uncle, and the throne has switched to a different branch of the family. Probably a good thing - this guy has great attributes, two sons and a grandson.

Consumption and Typhoid Fever have been rife recently, half of my court seems to have one or the other.

Paradox have put up a post-mortem of the game so far, with some hints of where it's going next:

Crusader Kings II - Post Mortem Dev Diary

The game is released, the reviews are in, and the response so far has been overwhelmingly positive. It's been a long road, and a few of you might be interested to know the dirty secrets of the development process here at Paradox... Also, what we have in store for you in the future. So don't get scared by the wall of text; get comfy, pop a Valium and chill out to the "Tron: Legacy" soundtrack as I tell you the story of Crusader Kings II.

On paper, Crusader Kings II was an 18 month project, the same as Hearts of Iron 3. In comparison, Victoria II and EU:Rome were made in 12 months, and Sengoku eight. With the varying number of team members in different phases of the projects, these figures are a bit misleading but should still give you an inkling of the relative budgets. The idea was simple: take the original Crusader Kings design, cut out the chaff, remake the game in the Clausewitz engine and make it our most polished release ever. (To be clear, we did not port anything from the old code base; we didn't even look at it.) We were very wary of adding more new features than we could handle (*cough* HoI3 *cough*.) Thus, the design document was divided into core, major and minor features. The major and minor features were modular and ordered by priority, so that we could simply start cutting the least important ones if it looked we would not have time to do them properly. In fact, we expected to have to cut some of them, and yes, we thought that some would eventually make good DLC.

Now, there are a lot of negative opinions about DLC among gamers these days. In some cases, it's justified; some DLC material just isn't worth the money. However, I've never understood the argument that "it should have been in the game from the start". Everything should apparently have been in the game, including an onion peeler and a self-aware AI. There are so many obvious problems with long development cycles that anyone should be able to understand that this argument is simply nonsense. It's far better to make a fun and balanced game with all the core features working properly than to either release a buggy bloated mess or a game with a huge budget (and thus a huge risk) and hefty price tag that's already outdated on release after five years of development.

So what did we cut from Crusader Kings II? Basically, this:

· A medieval style chronicle with annual entries

· Trade post holdings built by the republics (Venice, Genoa, etc)

· Hiring ships from the great republics

· Relics that can be found, looted, and used to build cathedrals

· Loads of very rare narrative events (like "The Gates of Hell") with multi-generational effects

· A viceroy/drots/great seneschal council position for each kingdom held

· Cadet branches of dynasties

· Adventures - younger sons raising an army and going off to conquer something on their own

Will all these things become DLC? Probably not, but some likely will, and others might be patched in for free (or, well, basically paid for by those who do buy our DLC.) Note that playable non-Christians, republics and theocracies were never planned (though always considered good material for expansions.)

A few areas of the game went off on a tangent from the original design as development progressed. For example, the map turned out much prettier and more advanced than I had envisioned, thanks to the efforts of Tegus (Fredrik Zetterman.) Also, things like the vassal and dynasty trees, the Wikipedia links and the panning map in the lobby (courtesy of Johan Lerström) were not in the design doc. As always, there are also parts of the game that I am not 100% happy with. Plots could be more dynamic and have a better interface, the marriage interfaces are a bit clunky, the general GUI can be intimidating to newcomers and battles are not interactive. On the whole though, it all turned out pretty much as intended.

So, what are we planning for the future? Crusader Kings II will have many major DLC packs that are actually more like small expansions. Every time we release a major DLC, we will also release a major free content patch. I cannot say exactly when we will be adding what, but here are some things you can expect for free in the coming months:

· Enhanced, more focused Crusades with a "contribution" score

· Causes of Death

· Asking to join an ongoing war

· Lots of more plots and ambitions

· Events, events, and more events

· Improved GUI where it's needed the most (plots, marriages)

· Flexible de jure liege structure

· More de jure kingdoms

Of course, we will also be fixing bugs, plugging exploits and improving the interface, the AI and game balance. Oh, and unleash some DLC...

Thank you all for the positive response and for buying the game, ensuring that we can keep making the games you want to play

Some of the cut features sound great (I particularly like the idea of 'adventures').

Right, is there a way to change the Norwegian monarchy system from elective to, erm, "normal"? I've managed to hold onto the throne for three generations so far, but juggling the cut-throat Norwegian elector counts is bloody hard work. I'm going to presume it has something to do with getting to maximum crown authority...aka the "instant mega cluster-fuck rebellion" mode...

Yeah, under the laws screen you can change it. It's not easy but not too hard either - you need to have reigned for 10 years and all your (direct, I think) vassals must have at least a neutral opinion of you. You also need high (not maximum) crown authority to implement primogeniture - this means that it can take a few generations to be able implement that law change, if you're in charge of a new kingdom. Gavelkind doesn't need any authority levels, and I haven't bothered investigating seniority yet. Each succession law has significant downsides, so choose carefully.

I quite like seniority. If you make sure the older people don't marry, the older branches of your dynasty die off and you end up with twenty year olds that you can then use for your crown law changing needs and such.

Right, quick question about inheritances. I've been thinking of betrothing my son tactically, looking over the irish sea at england i can see the duke of lancaster has two sister each with claims on the majority of northern england. However when i look through the 'betrothal search' it doesn't highlight these claims when i hover their portraits.
Does this mean they won't be valid claims when their betrothal comes to... ahem - fruition?
I don't want to be marrying my only son to some landless fool.